1/5/2020 – Michigan State 87, Michigan 69 – 10-4, 1-2  Big Ten

The main reason the above scoreline happened was an event that happened four years ago. Two croots diverged in a yellow wood. Michigan either got tired of waiting for Cassius Winston or figured out that he was going to Michigan State and grabbed Zavier Simpson out from under Wisconsin's nose.

This was a good move. Simpson is a beloved bulldog weirdo with a skyhook and a game that evolves like his hair. He was the starting point guard on teams that went to the Sweet 16 and played in the title game, teams that finished 6th and 7th in Kenpom. He is supremely gifable.

We are all richer for having the Zavier Simpson experience.

But it must be said that he is not Cassius Winston. This is only a problem when Michigan plays Cassius Winston, but for the fourth straight time it's been the problem. Last year MSU screened and rescreened Winston until Michigan's defense developed cracks while MSU switched Tillman onto Simpson on ball screens; Michigan could not shoot over this or punish the post mismatch.

Winston went NBA Jam in this game, scoring 32 points on 24 shot equivalents with 9 assists against two turnovers. There was a sequence of awful stepback threes and off the dribble floaters that all went down, and the worst thing is that you expected them to go down. Michigan threw all its various pick and roll coverages at Winston and it didn't matter.

Simpson doggedly scored a couple of offensive rebounds and a steal, had 8 assists and two turnovers himself, and scored 14 points on 20 shot equivalents. You can add an asterisk and convert one of those shot equivalents to a Kobe assist if you want. It still doesn't get Simpson anywhere near Winston. And Michigan can't make that up without Isaiah Livers and/or three-point shooting better than putrid. Thus that.

Honestly though, this felt a lot less bad than last year, when MSU's switching led to long sequences of play where Michigan could not find a shot of any description. Here they found shots decently and did not make them. Michigan had one drought midway through the first half where MSU pushed out to a nine point lead, and that's the point the game oscillated around until John Teske fouled out with four minutes left and Michigan went to a zone with Brandon Johns at C and a bunch of quick desperation chucks on offense.

And that's with Winston having an out of body experience while Michigan shoots 22% from three. This was a game that invited Michigan to go away over and over, and only Teske fouling out really opened the floodgates. It's time to dial post-Trident expectations back about 80% of the way. That still leaves Michigan in an excellent spot to make the tourney with ease.

[After THE JUMP: Hoth time]

Pictured: Michigan road three point shooting

A trend or a blip? Michigan fell from 14th to 30th in three point shooting after this game, and now has the following lines in their three road games:

• @ Louisville: 3/19
• @ Illinois: 3/18
• @ Michigan State: 5/23

That is a Hoth-worthy 18%. I don't know what to do with this. Even if Michigan is somehow more susceptible to bad road shooting than other teams the effect can't possibly be that strong. I mean… right? Like the other games, Michigan shots seemed more or less fine. MSU was able to close out reasonably well, but until David DeJulius put up a couple chucks late there weren't any shots that seemed bad.

MSU did push six attempts to Zavier Simpson. When the rest of the team is 4/17 that does not suffice as an explanation. Livers's absence does explain part of it.

The team as constituted. Michigan cannot survive shooting performances like the above. They have two starting guards who are barely six-foot and are still an entirely Beilein-recruited team that's heavy on the shooting and extremely light on athleticism—even for a Beilein team. The one guy who's clearly a plus athlete is Johns.

There are teams that can power through ugly outside shooting performances, and maybe Juwan Howard will start fielding them in the near future. This team cannot.

Get back, get back, get back. The most frustrating thing about that game was Michigan getting burned on transition off makes. This was a major issue against Michigan State a few years ago that Michigan did figure out, but Beilein and Yaklich departing has apparently erased this bit of the institutional memory. In this game Michigan either got a straight-up transition bucket on its face or found itself locked into ugly cross-matches that MSU exploited way too often.

This was doubly and triply frustrating because 1) Michigan had three weeks to prep for MSU and 2) the same thing happened to them in the Iowa game. This has got to be a point of emphasis going forward.

Michigan could use some more gamesmanship here: ball goes through basket, grab it, throw it at ref. That buys you a little bit of time, especially if your throw to the ref isn't in the shooting pocket, as it were. They could also try to use the guy who scores as a defender on the inbounds to delay it a second or two; it doesn't take much to get back and get set.

bad not good bad bad [Campredon]

Livers was not replaceable. Not that we thought he was, but two of the above three bullet points were impacted by Livers's absence. Obviously missing your 50% three point shooter is an issue. Johns had a decent game, all things considered, but after he missed an early three he started turning down open shots. Michigan turned those into much worse shots.

On the defensive end, part of the get-back problem was Michigan playing a LOT OF WEIRD GUYS, including a number of lineups I don't think we've seen all season. A fair number of these had two posts, which made it harder for M to get back since not only are those guys slower they're also inclined to be near the bucket. It also made cross-match issues worse since those guys are much less versatile defenders than Livers.

Johns did decently. He put up 12 points, had a tough and-one, defended decently, and had a couple of quality takes to the bucket. Like everyone else except Wagner he scuffled to a meh ORTG, largely because he was 1/4 from three and had 3 TOs. You can see the potential there.

this one did not go in [Campredon]

Big Country. Austin Davis got 15 minutes and had a few buckets, including a nice drop-step finish for a layup. His limitations are still there—I think all but one of his misses were packed back in his face and Michigan remains extremely reluctant to toss him the ball as a roller—but he's way ahead of where he was last year. One point for Juwan Howard big development; even if Davis doesn't do much more than chip in a few minutes here and there before a grad transfer his emergence is a positive sign for down the road.

Hopefully Castleton can make similar progress next year; he was rough in this game. It seemed like the environment to got him, too, as he turned down an open three early.

please do not pumpkin up [Campredon]

Brooks evaporation issues. Eli Brooks had a decent game against Illinois, getting 12 points on 12 shot equivalents. In Michigan's other three losses he has a total of 6 points despite averaging 31 MPG. Other teams have successfully limited his three-point attempts. Here he got four off and missed them all.

I wonder if he is more susceptible to home/road stuff than the average player. Last year he kept getting playing time and people kept saying he was playing well in practice only to wilt under the lights. A hot start this year looks like turning the corner, but if you look at his numbers it jumps out that his ORTG goes from 104 overall to 85 against Kenpom's A+B tiers*.

I'm worried that Brooks is going to turn back into a pumpkin. Michigan has two games that aren't A or B the rest of the year. (Yes, those are against Nebraska.) Speaking of…

*[this roughly means top 100 opponents once you adjust for home/road effects]

Must be mentioned. This Breslin rogering was not as horrendous as many others but did result in Juwan Howard's first career technical. Howard on that:

"I'm going to back up my team for all 40 minutes of the ball game," Howard said. "That possession, I had seen enough. I saw a lot of contact. I saw contact being made when we were driving to the lane to finish and unfortunately got hit on the arm.

"And then I saw contact when one of our bigs went up and tried to finish and he got bumped. And to me it was like an obvious foul. But unfortunately it wasn't called, so I got a little beside myself. I'm an emotional guy, and I'm going to always fight for my players."

I cannot believe—except I can—that Teske got hit with a phantom foul just a couple minutes into the game. It was a loose ball foul on which Teske did not contest the rebound and MSU's guy easily gathered it in. At no point in any basketball game should a loose ball foul that does not actually impact who rebounds the ball get called, let alone a nonsense call just minutes into the game. This led to a game of foul trouble for Teske, 15 minutes for Davis, and that late collapse.

Related. Chris Holtmann bitched about how Kaleb Wesson was fouled repeatedly by Wisconsin in OSU's home loss to the Badgers. This inexplicably was the subject of a BTN segment attempting to back Holtmann up, which is doubly inexplicable because this was the best they had:

I’m biased but does anyone see a legit foul on Wesson in these clips? pic.twitter.com/jyAtQ6xyzV

— Bart Trvik (@totally_t_bomb) January 6, 2020

That the premiere episode of "Big Ten Basketball and Beyond" made Holtmann's bitching/politicking the featured story out of Wisconsin's massive road win over Ohio State is ... interesting.

— Bart Trvik (@totally_t_bomb) January 6, 2020

Torvik was so incensed by this he has an entire thread on it. I can't recall any other school getting a segment on a conference-owned network trying to sell out the conference's own officials with no justification.

Hope you like knife fights. This was supposed to be a down year for the Big Ten. It's not. There are two horrible teams, and then there's this:

barttorvik dot com

That is 12 top 50 teams and 10(!!!) top 25 teams, per Torvik, including Rutgers. Kenpom isn't much different, and ranks the Big Ten as the nation's best conference by a whopping 2.5 points of efficiency margin. If you're not playing Northwestern or Nebraska you're going up against a team with legitimate tourney hopes.

The natural result of this:

Projected most difficult overall schedules: pic.twitter.com/TST1Kfkv24

— Bart Trvik (@totally_t_bomb) January 6, 2020

Gird thyselves. Michigan's a good basketball team but I think we've discovered over the past month that it's probably not good enough to overcome the above without taking various slings and arrows, especially with Livers out for an undefined period of time. Michigan needs to make its three layups against the NUs, and at that point going .500 against the rest of the schedule gets you to 11-9 in conference and gets you something like a 6 seed.

The goal is to not be the Big Ten team(s) that clearly deserve to be in the tourney based on Wins Above Bubble and other objective measures but get left out so Syracuse can be a 12 seed.

Quit saying a thing. Every time talk turns to recruiting and Michigan's scholarship situation someone broaches the idea that Jace Howard could walk on, and then someone else jumps in with an assertion that Howard can't do that because he took an official visit. I have no idea where this came from but it appears to be bunk. Here's a kid who walked on to the football team just last year:

"I am on an official visit to Michigan, and I have taken Coach Harbaugh's preferred walkon offer to come here for college," Castleberry stated.

I have googled for this and can find zero evidence that taking an official means you can't walk on. This must be a confusion based on "blueshirting," which is a way around football's limit of 25 scholarships per year. A blueshirt can get a scholarship when he arrives on campus but in order to do so he has to qualify as "unrecruited," which means an official is off the table.

So: Michigan has two open slots, two seniors, and has the option of not giving Austin Davis a fifth year. Howard can walk-on. So Michigan can take Zeb Jackson, Terrance Williams, Hunter Dickinson, Isaiah Todd, a walk-on version of Howard, and one other without any other attrition. Attrition is likely, whether that's Todd going overseas, Livers heading to the NBA, or someone on the current roster surveying the situation and transferring. I'd regard Howard like Jake Moody in football: he's coming, he's not promised a scholarship, but it's pretty likely that one opens up for him.

Continue saying other things. The "one other" could be a pretty big deal:

Placed a new FutureCast selection for Josh Christopher yesterday. Decision is not imminent but one program has gained moment with the top two-way guard https://t.co/KJzqkuLTeE

— Corey Evans (@coreyevans_10) January 4, 2020

You can probably deduct which program has gained momentum from the fact that the above tweet is embedded on this website.

FWIW, Christopher has recently had Kevin Durant and Ja Morant sit in on his games. Also Quavo. I guess there's not that much to do in LA for millionaires?